Wholesale CBDC yet to click with traders, market participants

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra at the RBI headquarters

The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) pilot of the central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the wholesale segment is still to pick up, with the e-Rupee circulation, in value terms, far behind the retail segment.

In value terms, Rs 0.08 crore worth of digital currency was in circulation in 2024 against Rs 10.69 crore in the previous year, RBI data shows.

The circulation is limited because traders and market participants are not very keen to trade in e-Rupee for G-Secs or government securities, as it is still in the pilot stage, experts said.

A senior bank executive said since this is a pilot and the regulator has asked them to continue testing the product, banks are doing it sporadically. Therefore, the volumes and value of digital currency in wholesale trades continue to remain low.

The Rs 500 digital currency value of 164.36 worth Rs 70.2 crore was in circulation in 2024, which was the highest among the other denominations, on an overall basis, that is, including retail and wholesale e-Rupee.

The retail segment have seen a sharp growth in volume terms to Rs 237.8 crore in 2024 compared to Rs 17.1 crore in 2023.

The Rs 500 digital currency was the most popular, with pieces worth Rs 70.2 crore were in circulation in 2024, the highest for any denomination among retail and wholesale e-Rupee, RBI data shows.

The RBI launched the wholesale pilot of CBDC on November 1, 2022 to settle G-Secs trades using the digital rupee.

Nine banks — State Bank of India (SBI), Bank of Baroda (BoB), Union Bank of India (UBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank, and HSBC — were identified for testing.

Later, the RBI extended the pilot to the call money market.

In its annual report for 2023-24, the RBI said CBDC (e₹) has been implemented in both wholesale and retail pilot segments. The use cases of CBDC are still evolving.

Presently, the existing inter-bank call money trades are settled using RTGS. However, with e₹-W, banks can settle the call money trades in real-time in e-Kuber without involvement of RTGS application, the report said.

The balances of e₹-W were mirrored with NPCI in real time to facilitate the migration of e₹-W to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform.